He frowned slightly at the last word, passing it by to revert to the direct answer to his question.
"At once? No—I can't see that the suggestion carries its explanation with it."
Mrs. Ansell looked at him hesitatingly. She was conscious of the ill-chosen word that still reverberated between them, and the unwonted sense of having blundered made her, for the moment, less completely mistress of herself.
"Ah, you'll see farther presently—" She rose again, unfurling her lace sunshade, as if to give a touch of definiteness to her action. "It's not, after all," she added, with a sweet frankness, "a case for argument, and still less for persuasion. My reasons are excellent—I should insist on putting them to you myself if they were not! But they're so good that I can leave you to find them out—and to back them up with your own, which will probably be a great deal better."
She summed up with a light nod, which included both Amherst and his mother, and turning to descend the verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr. Langhope, who was limping disconsolately toward the house.
"What has she been saying to you, mother?" Amherst asked, returning to his seat beside his mother.
Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and a raised forefinger of reproval. "Now, Johnny, I won't answer a single question till you smooth out those lines between your eyes."
Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. "Well, dear, there have to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to take your share—" His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow gives out a suggestion of warmth.
He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore, and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which her son's wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all traces of the difficult years; and the fact that his marriage had enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain in his life's confused total of profit and loss. It was, at any rate, the sense of Bessy's share in the change that softened his voice when he spoke of her to his mother.
"Now, then, if I present a sufficiently unruffled surface, let us go back to Mrs. Ansell—for I confess that her mysterious reasons are not yet apparent to me."